Tule Royal Wedding, PLANNING A ROYAL WEDDING 3: BEHIND THE SCENES

GIVEAWAY: We will be giving away a print copy of Liz Fielding’s The Bridesmaid’s Royal Bodyguard. Comment in our post with what you’re looking forward to in Harry and Meghan’s upcoming wedding! As this will be a continuing blog series, make sure to comment on all related posts leading up to the wedding for a chance to win each book in the Royal Wedding Invitations series!
We will announce the winners in our weekly newsletter, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already!

PLANNING A ROYAL WEDDING 3: BEHIND THE SCENES
Jessica Hart and Liz Fielding

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle marry at Windsor Castle on 19 May, we’ll all be eager to see the fairy-tale elements of a royal wedding: the majestic setting of Windsor Castle, the gathering of royal guests, the cheering crowds lining the street, the horse-drawn carriage taking the bride and groom through Windsor and then back to the Castle along the iconic Long Walk to a reception in St George’s Hall.

Continue reading


A Release Day Interview with USA Today Bestselling Author Melissa McClone!

ChristmasAtTheCastle_3001. Tell us a bit about the Ever After series.

The Ever After series consists of three stories (with plans for more) that involve some aspect of Reality TV. Ever After is the name of the production company, and the four person film crew appears in each story. Other secondary characters appear, too, but each romance is standalone. I recently added epilogues to the first two books, The Honeymoon Prize and The Cinderella Princess, to align the series together. It was so much fun to revisit those stories! Continue reading


Madeline Ash takes over the Tule Blog!

SexySummer-FRONTThanks for having me on the Tule blog today to introduce The Playboy in the Sexy Summer boxed set! This novella is set in the peak of summer in Byron Bay, Australia – a coastal town with gorgeous surfers, sparkling blue surf, and soft white sand. This lush location had so many opportunities for sexy summer fun, and I adored writing about sea-sticky skin, salt-encrusted surfer hair, and long, lazy days (and nights) by the beach.

The hero, Parker, was a player in his teenage years: blond, gold-toned, and loaded – and arrogant to the point where he humiliated the heroine Alexia. Six years later, he’s learned humility and wants to make up for the way he treated her.

ThePlayboy-300dpiAlexia is a successful actor, but has reached a point where she needs sexual experience to secure an upcoming role. Her goals starts off simple: find a guy to hook up with. But as her failures accumulate, Alexia realizes she’s running from guys because she wants her first time to mean something. She wants connection and attraction…two things she feels very strongly around Parker, the very man who has treated her poorly in the past. There’s nothing like a rift to force the denial of serious sexual chemistry.

I hope you enjoy this hot, racy beach read!

 


 

Buy your copy of the Sexy Summer Boxed Set here:

Amazon | Nook | iBooks | Kobo | GooglePlay


auth_MadelineAshMadeline has always lived in Melbourne. She is emotionally allergic to spontaneity, and yet doesn’t mind the weather that drags her into rain when she’s planned for sunshine. She likes to call this her wild side.

She’s a Virgo, vegetarian, and once had a romantic suspense-style dream in which the hero was a shredded lettuce sandwich and the villain was a cherry tomato. The tomato got away. She took the dream as a sign that she’d better stick to writing contemporary romance.

Her stories have spunky heroines, strong heroes, and as much dialogue as she can cram in. As for why she writes romance, she’s in a long-term relationship with the genre and writing such stories makes it happy.

 

 


Visit with NYT & USA Today Bestselling Author Barbara Dunlop!

UnpredictableMatchI can’t believe we’ve released Book Five in the Match Series!

I can clearly remember the holiday where my daughter and I brainstormed ideas for the zany senior citizens at the heart of the stories.  There are five of them: JW the former Green Beret, Sam who was a NASA genius, quirky, impulsive Daisy, Lizbet a highly successful businesswoman, and earth-mother Hannah.

From their Florida seniors’ residence, they invent the most successful matchmaking program in the world.  I knew right away the crew would have endless fun messing with the lives of their grandchildren.  Each story is a new match.  And each new match brings tougher challenges to the seniors who have to surreptitiously throw their heirs into the paths of their perfect mates and keep them there long enough to let the magic—or the science, depending on who you ask—go to work.

It started with An Unlikely Match, featuring a nerd and an aspiring actress in Southern California.  An Impractical Match pairs an uptight perfectionist of an event planner with slightly wild motor cross racer.  In An Extraordinary Match, a float plane pilot puts the daughter of his family’s arch-enemy in prison.  While a typo in the matchmaking program has a construction contractor reluctantly attempting to match the perfect woman with his brother in An Astonishing Match.

That brings us to number five, An Unpredictable Match.  Obviously, the crew can’t leave the brother from book four all alone and lonely.  He’s a brilliant, independent, workaholic, coerced by his grandmother into offering his mansion as a film set.  She’s a charming film producer battling a tyrannical boss.  For good measure, the seniors toss in a beautiful starlet as a red herring.

Summer’s nearly here, and I’m looking longingly outside at the sunshine.  Still, I can’t help thinking about book number six…


Buy An Unpredictable Match from your favorite online retailer!
Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo | Google Play


BarbX2015XLargeBarbara Dunlop is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of fifty romance novels. A three time finalist in the prestigious RITA award, she is also a two time winner of the RWA Golden Heart award. An Unlikely Match, the first book in her acclaimed Match series, was a number one bestseller on Amazon. Barbara makes her home in Yukon with her bush pilot husband and the moose and bears that wander through their yard.

 


Teri Wilson takes over the Tule Blog!

TheArtofUs-300dpiHi, everyone! My name is Teri Wilson, and while I’m not new to writing, I’m new to Tule Publishing. I love, love, love writing romance, and I also write for a fun website called HelloGiggles.com, where I cover everything pop culture-related, from the Duchess of Cambridge’s hair to Oreos with Harry Potter’s face in the crème filling. (Seriously, I’ve written about both of those things this week.)

I’m really excited about my book for Tule, The Art of Us, which is a modern retelling of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady with a fine art twist. The heroine, Dr. Harper Higgins, is an art history professor and a Van Gogh scholar. She’s even got a one-eared dog named Vincent. (Aww, right?!) The hero of The Art of Us, Tom Stone, is a brooding former soldier. He’s also a painter.

My inspiration for Tom’s character came from a real-life initiative called The Combat Paper Project. Based in San Francisco, The Combat Paper Project helps warriors adjust to coming back home after serving their country in combat. They believe in the therapeutic process of art and creativity and help soldiers turn their actual wartime uniforms into paper pulp and gorgeous collages. Drew Cameron, one of the founders of this amazing organization says, “The story of the fiber, the blood, sweat and tears, the months of hardship and brutal violence are held within those old uniforms. The uniforms often become inhabitants of closets or boxes in the attic. Reshaping that association of subordination, of warfare and service, into something collective and beautiful is our inspiration.”

You can learn more about The Combat Paper Project at their website: www.combatpaper.org.

I do hope you’ll give Harper and Tom’s story a read. They share an emotional, romantic journey of healing and renewal, because love is its own work of art.

Thanks for reading!

Teri

TERIXWILSONXAUTHORXIMAGEXOVERX1200XpixelsXX1XTeri Wilson is a romance novelist for Harlequin Books and Tule Publishing, as well as a contributing writer at HelloGiggles.com, a lifestyle and entertainment website founded by Zooey Deschanel and now a division of People Magazine. Teri is the author of UNLEASHING MR. DARCY, now a Hallmark Channel Original Movie. She loves books, travel, animals and dancing every day. Visit Teri at www.teriwilson.net or on Twitter @TeriWilsonauthr.

 


Visit with Sons of San Clemente author Sinclair Jayne! (And enter to win a free book!)

Broken

By Sinclair Jayne

Jayne-Broken-300dpiHeading south again to San Clemente in Southern California is always a hotly anticipated journey, especially now that I live in the Pacific Northwest where this winter has been disagreeably soggy.  So there was no procrastination to write the first lines of my second Sons of San Clemente contemporary romance, Broken.  My only question as I opened a Word file, which Son? Duh.  I had to go with Lane Duke, professional surfer, Kadan Carson’s (hero of Wrecked) best friend.  Intellectually I’d like to say it was because Lane made logical sense, but really, it was his gorgeous hair.  Long, bright blonde and curly.  It had taken on a life of its own in my imagination as I wrote Wrecked, and I really wanted to hang out with him (and his hair) again.  On the surface, Lane is the antithesis of what you’d expect a surfer to be.  As CEO of a billionaire dollar plus gaming empire, he’s an ultimate Type A: intense, driven, competitive, athletic, rich, and controlling.  But he has another side.

9781943963225Who better to discover Lane’s hidden depths than the heroine, Luz De Luna, who wants nothing to do with him?  Luz and Lane have a history that Lane, the ultimate risk taker who’s never met a challenge he didn’t want to get up-in-your-face- personal with, is tempted to dig up.  Luz, who’s always taken the safe path, wants to keep their ghosts buried.  Deep.  As I began to flesh out her history and backstory with Lane in November, Willamette Valley in OR had its first snow.  I watched our leafless grapevines get shrouded in snow, and I thought of the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  What if you could go back and take the road not taken?  What if you had to, especially if you didn’t want to?

That’s what Luz is facing when she returns to her hometown of San Clemente feeling broken.   Blazing new path she creates on her own.  She’s determined to walk this one solo, only Lane doesn’t do “no” too well. Lane may look like an angel with his halo of golden hair, but he exudes temptation like a devil, and Luz has never been as immune to him as she’d like to pretend.

GIVEAWAY

Leave a comment for Sinclair to enter to win a free copy of “Wrecked” – Book 1 in the series!

auth_SinclairJayneSinclair Jayne has loved reading romance novels since she discovered Barbara Cartland historical romances when she was in sixth grade. By seventh grade, she was haunting the library shelves looking to fall in love over and over again with the heroes born from the imaginations of her favorite authors. After teaching writing classes and workshops to adults and teens for many years in Seattle and Portland, she returned to her first love of reading romances and became an editor for Tule Publishing last year. Sinclair lives in Oregon’s wine country where she and her family own a small vineyard of Pinot Noir and where she dreams of being able to write at a desk like Jane Austen instead of in parking lots waiting for her kids to finish one of their 12,000 extracurricular activities.



Holiday Recipe and Giveaway from Jolyse Barnett!

My Adirondack Christmas

I was born and raised in upstate New York, one of five children living with our hard-working, loving parents in a large clapboard house, painted white. Come December each year, our large yard, where we enjoyed Sunday summer picnics with our extended family, would be blanketed in snow. And there’d be a special magic in the air…

Most every house in my childhood Adirondack village decorated for the season, Christmas trees glowing bright through front windows and strands of lights outlining houses—from the farm homes on the country back roads to the houses huddled together in the center of our quaint little town.ChristmasXLightXCover

An evergreen wreath with a velvet red bow on our front door welcomed friends and family into our home. Our freshly cut tree would be draped with strings of popcorn and cranberries, mounds of silvery tinsel, and treasured ornaments unpacked from brown boxes stored in the attic.

On Christmas morning, my younger brother and I always woke first and would tiptoe downstairs to find our tree overflowing with presents. We’d read the tags and giggle with excitement whenever we found one of our names, but we dared not touch. Against Dad’s rules. We also knew the true meaning of Christmas wasn’t in the gifts inside those wrapped boxes, but all around us in the love we shared and in God’s love for us through his Son sent to save us.

So we quietly emptied our Christmas stockings—those we were allowed to open!—made by our mother. I can still remember mine, knitted in red and white with a green tree shape below my name. Onto the couch spilled oranges, apples, and hard candies. If we’d been extra good that year, a Lifesaver “book” would slide onto each of our piles of goodies as well.

Soon the clan would all gather at the kitchen table, talking and laughing about shared family memories and the anticipation of the day as we dug into our home fries and scrambled eggs and bacon. All seven of us would help clean the dishes before changing into our Sunday best and bundling up to brave the chilly northern air.

Our family’s church was filled to the rafters on Holy Days and especially so on Christmas. Contentment enveloped me as I sat snuggled between my brother and Mom in our family’s cozy pew. We’d smile and nod at aunts, uncles and cousins along with friends and neighbors we’d known our whole lives. When the service began, I’d gaze at the candlelit alter covered in festive red and purple linens and inhaling the spicy incense as I listened to the priest read familiar stories of Christ’s birth. When it came time for the Christmas carols, I’d belt them out loud and clear, my favorites Away in a Manger and Hark the Herald Angels Sing.

The rest of our Christmas Day would be a flurry of activity. We’d open presents at our house then travel to my father’s parents’ house a few minutes down the country road, eat an early ham dinner then open more presents. Our older siblings would drift upstairs to chill with the older cousins and my father would go play pinochle with his brothers and dad at the large table in the den while my mother, aunts, and grandmother chatted close by. My little brother and I would hang out with our cousins all close in age in the living room next to the Christmas tree. Oh, how fascinated I was by the bubble ornaments as a child! We’d laugh and play and sneak into the kitchen time and again for treats until well after dark.

Thinking back to all the delicious desserts spread on my grandmother’s kitchen table brings back wonderful memories of my mother. She was an incredible baker. She made fried doughnuts from scratch, all sorts of pies (my favorite was her strawberry rhubarb pie), homemade fudge, oodles of cookies, bon bons, and more. At Christmas, her peanut brittle was my favorite.

 

PeanutXBrittleXinXaXPanXSADonna’s Peanut Brittle

½ teaspoon baking soda

2 cups granulated sugar

1 Tablespoon butter

Dash of salt*

1 cup peanuts

Throw butter and sugar in a cast iron skillet and heat until it turns liquid then cook about four minutes, stirring constantly. Add peanuts to the mixture while stirring and cook a few more minutes. Add baking soda, stirring gently until the mixture is light and foamy. Remove from heat and immediately pour mixture onto a buttered cookie sheet. Spread mixture thinly and allow to cool. Break into small pieces and serve.

*dash= 1/8 teaspoon

 

ChristmasXLightXCoverAs you might imagine, Adirondack Christmas memories such as those I shared above did much to inspire my fictional town of Starling in Christmas Light. I wanted to share my take on the spirit of a small town community, the bonds of love and acceptance that allow family members to forge through their differences—wherever they might live—and the beauty of the Adirondack region. And too, that imperfect as we may be, each of us can find the perfect mate for us…if only we’re brave enough to take that leap of faith, ask forgiveness, and believe in the miracle of unconditional love.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

 

 

GIVEAWAY

In the spirit of the season and the celebration of reading, I’m giving away a $10 Amazon gift card to a random commenter. All you have to do is share one of your Christmas favorites, whether it be a song, a tradition, an ornament, or whatever! I look forward to reading them. oxo Jolyse

auth_JolyseBarnettJolyse Barnett may not be able to cook to save her life, but she can whip up a delicious romantic tale. She discovered the joy of playing with words at a young age, filling notebooks with poetry and stacks of pink diaries with her teenage angst and dreams. After she graduated from high school, she developed a more practical side. She earned her degree in Writing (Of course!), fell in love with her best friend (Yes!), and now lives her own happily-ever-after (Yay!). She enjoys a fulfilling day job and explores the world one vacation at a time with her two children and real-life hero. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

 

Christmas gift via photopin (license)